Video formats- newbie- which one

mrbill66 wrote on 3/11/2007, 8:37 PM
Been using VMS for a bit of still photo CD making etc. But now looking into getting a Video Camera also. Reading what I can on this forum but need to get some ideas on the file formats in use by cameras and which would be best for use with VMS etc.

Should we go with a DVD cam, or a Hard Disc cam or MiniDV tape etc. Also is these new High Def cameras editable in VMS.

Ive heard the MPEG 4 is hard to deal with..?? How abou this H.264 or something. I also heard of something that goes by AV??? something. What is up with all these different formants and which way shoud we go to be editable.

What formats are used for:
Hard Disc
DVD Camera
MiniDV

Thanks for any info...or links to where I can dig in depth.

Comments

rustier wrote on 3/11/2007, 11:02 PM
I would suggest miniDV. both the dvd and hard drive compress the video a lot and editing compressed video can be annoying, sometimes tricky. Also keep in mind anytime you rerender a compressed video (in VMS) you will lose something because of the way it is compressed. MiniDV in general uses a better format (DVavi) for editing. High def cameras are nice I hear - I don't have one yet. One must consider what you intend to do with the video. High def can be rerendered to a standard format with very high quality. If you want to stay high def, you need a high def burner and then a high def player (how many people do you know have that?) There are still some bugaboo's working with it. Slowly but surely they are working them out. Good luck with it.
IanG wrote on 3/12/2007, 3:26 AM
Yes, go with miniDV - for all the reasons mentioned by rustier. I haven't seen much about hard drive cameras in here but a lot of people have had problems with DVD camcorders.

Ian G.
chapow1 wrote on 3/13/2007, 9:19 PM
I purchased a Sony DCR-SR40 hard disc camera & love it. You don't have to worry about DVD's or tapes running out. Only downfall is that it takes up a lot of room on your computers hard drive. I actually purchased an external hard drive & put all of my unedited video on it until I have time for editing.
Kevin Mc wrote on 3/13/2007, 11:35 PM
I've been using a MiniDV camera for about 6 months and the image quality is fantastic. The small DVDs record at a fairly high compression - compressing video 4 times more than that of a MiniDV. The more your original video is compressed the less editing and re-rendering you can do with it and still retain good video quality. The hard drive cams are nice, but hard drives eventually fail. Heck, eventually everything fails :). I would guess that the hard drive cams record at the same level of compression as MiniDV's -- but I'd confirm that first if I were you...
IanG wrote on 3/14/2007, 4:04 PM
>I would guess that the hard drive cams record at the same level of compression as MiniDV's

They use MPEG2 compression - the bitrate's variable but it can be very low - much more compressed than MiniDV.

Ian G.